History will judge the presidency of George W. Bush, but the culture has already spoken.

Although talking at the movies is generally discouraged, this national conversation is loudest at the multiplex, where what we think and how we feel are showing at 7 and 9 p.m., with matinees on weekends.

And not just in the pedantic and divisive manner of a proponent or critic preaching to the choir like "W." on the left or "An American Carol" on the right, but in the way that daily life is like a grab bag of mixed messages we either respond to or ignore.

It's tough to generalize about films released during the Bush presidency - an estimated 4,000, through next month- and conclusions about them are as diverse as the people making them. But the emergence and recurrence of certain themes that mirror the mood of the country should be obvious to even casual observers.

That's because the culture always respond to shifts in the body politic, said Catherine Zimmer, an assistant professor of English who teaches film studies at Pace University in New York.

There is plenty of historical precedent to suggest that, when the going gets tough, Americans go to the movies. Seen in this light, the frivolous "High School Musical 3: Senior Year" is a descendant of Depression-era musicals that sang and danced their way through the wreckage of a failed economy. Despite paying record gas prices this summer, consumers still found discretionary income to make "The Dark Knight" the second-highest grossing film ever in North America. And when the bottom fell out of the stock market this fall, escapism bounced in on the stubby little legs of "Beverly Hills Chihuahua."

But film attendance, which climbed 8% in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, has dropped in each but one year since then, including an 8% slide in 2005. Attendance in 2007 was a modest 200,000 patrons higher than in 1990, and remains lower than the year Bush was inaugurated, according to the box-office tracking firm Media By Numbers.

Rising ticket prices help set box-office records - $9.7 billion in 2007 - but suggest the false economy of a subprime mortgage while doing so.

Still, anytime you can get a group of people with different problems, stories and beliefs to agree on anything, even facing in the same direction in the dark, it can only be a good thing.

And because we are citizens and audiences both, what we watch can say as much about us as our choices in the voting booth. So does what we don't watch. For instance, audiences rejected films about the Iraq war for reasons as numerous and complex as feelings about the conflict - and because some of those movies were bad.

"I don't think that you can make a movie so negative about the country the audience members are living in that they feel bad about themselves," said David Zucker, a Whitefish Bay native and director of the politically conservative comedy "An American Carol."

"Plenty of criticisms can be justly leveled at America for this or for that. But to come out of a theater thinking, 'Gee, America is the bad guy. Our soldiers are bad. And our military is bad.' I just don't think people want to hear that, even if it's true."

Another reason for such films' failure at the box office may be that they cut too close to the bone, and too soon.

"It's really hard to see something that directly represents a thing that's so upsetting to you," said Pace University's Zimmer. "There has to be this veil."

Different battlegrounds

And though the films that audiences did turn to appeared to be about something else entirely, many actually revolved around war and conflict.

The long, dark shadow of a rising menace casts a cloud over the "Harry Potter" films. "War!" was the first word onscreen in "Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith," the top-grossing film of 2005. Nothing less than the fate of the (fantasy) world was at stake in the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy. And in "300," an ancient grudge match between the Spartans and the invading Persians was a digitally shades-of-gray snow globe filled with blood and severed limbs.

"Random, unpredictable and uncontrollable" violence is infiltrating the culture in a subliminal way because "people are trying to find ways to put shadow plays of what's going on" into films, said Stanley Weiser, who wrote the screenplay for "W.," Oliver Stone's film about President Bush.

In that context, it's easy to look at "The Dark Knight" and see the Joker as a terrorist and "No Country for Old Men," which earlier this year won an Oscar for best picture, as a metaphor for pure evil.

"Pure evil seems to be out there," said Piers Handling, director of the Toronto International Film Festival. "It's not just Saddam or whoever. It's that your life can be changed overnight" by random violence. "It's a less secure world. We all feel more nervous in our skins."

Too, Zimmer saw a rise in horror films in general and "torture porn" in particular during the Bush years. The latter includes the "Saw" movies - five in five years - and films like "Hostel" and "Turistas."

You could see those films as "a disturbing symptom of the bloodlust of our time," she said, or a salvo in the debate over the torture of political prisoners.

A matter of interpretation

Stressing that he is not American and was not criticizing Bush, Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles said he has noticed a rise in the number of apocalyptic films and themes over the past eight years. But he noted that such observations are often in the eye of the beholder.

Although some audiences saw the story of warring survivors of a plague in his new film "Blindness" as a portrait of American international policy, Meirelles said, "I never thought of it."

"It's crazy how people see such things," he said.

There is no question that the Bush years resonated with a spiritual thirst that fueled interest in films like "The Passion of the Christ" and "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe," but also rebuttals such as the documentary "Religulous" and the anti-religion fantasy "The Golden Compass."

And the politically and socially conservative climate saw a rise in explicit material like "Zack and Miri Make a Porno," "Shortbus," and crude and taboo humor like "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" or "Knocked Up."

"It's what Freud called negation," Zimmer said. "That you end up producing the very ideas you oppose."

Dispute the chicken-and-egg relationship between politics and culture all you want, but if film art is in any way a canary-in-a-coal mine indicator, there is light at the end of the tunnel.

A flurry of recent films including "Juno," "Rachel Getting Married," "The Namesake," "The Darjeeling Limited" and "The Pool" (Milwaukee-based filmmaker Chris Smith's movie that opened for a one-week run Friday) are reassuring portraits of family, forgiveness and healing.